The Jacksonville Jaguars’ quest to recreate the 2008 Florida Gators continued Thursday morning.
Tim Tebow, 33, officially signed as a tight end with the NFL’s worst team of 2020.
The Jaguars hired Urban Meyer, Tebow’s national championship-winning coach at Florida, as their omniscient new head coach in January to succeed Doug Marrone.
Now Meyer is signing Tebow, who hasn’t played in the league since 2012. He flopped as an NFL quarterback after being a surprise first-round pick of the Broncos in the 2010 NFL Draft. Several teams had suggested a position change years ago, but Tebow refused.
“I know it will be a challenge, but it is a challenge I embrace,” Tebow said in statement released by the Jags.
“I am dedicated to taking the direction of our coaching staff and learning from my teammates. I appreciate everyone’s support as I embark on this new journey.”
Plenty of people, mainly fans, will be fascinated just to watch how this plays out. Others, including many execs and players in the league, aren’t as amused.
“Most ridiculous signing in the history of the league,” one player told the Daily News.
Several sources believe Meyer is risking the trust and respect of his locker room by giving his friend a job.
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Tebow is revered in the player ranks as one of the greatest college football players ever, but he wasn’t effective playing for the Broncos and Jets from 2010-12, outside of a game-winning 80-yard overtime TD pass to Demaryius Thomas against the Steelers in January 2012.
Tebow has one career target as a receiver: a 2012 Mark Sanchez pass that hit him in the helmet and glanced off incomplete. (Full disclosure: I saw it in person. I was helping to cover that game. If not for Sanchez’s Butt Fumble and Tebow’s national media deification, it would be much more infamous in Jets and NFL lore).
After exiting the NFL, Tebow spent five years in the Mets organization trying to be a professional baseball player. That went as well as his earlier effort to try and be a professional quarterback.
To some, Tebow receiving this opportunity is just the latest reinforcement that NFL owners blackballed Colin Kaepernick for political reasons. Not that more evidence is required. But a player as bad as Tebow getting a second chance while Kaepernick does not speaks for itself.
On top of that, last summer, more than 300 players lost their training camp spots by mid-August when the league and union reduced camp rosters from 90 to 80 due to COVID-19 protocols. Now Tebow is getting a camp spot handed to him by his former college coach, even though he hasn’t played in almost a decade.
Frankly, it’s hard to believe there was a story in the past week about a hoax in the NFL tryout community, and it was about former Austin Peay defensive back Juantarius Bryant and the Falcons, not Tebow.